Beer has been made for many years by various well known techniques and by using various apparatuses for many years as is well known. In general, these techniques can be divided into commercial and homemaking methods. Commercial techniques produce consistent quality beer of various types but the price of such beer is high due to taxes and the like which are placed on the beer.
Homemaking beer is far less expensive than buying commercially available beer and has become increasingly popular as the price of commercially available beer continues to rise. Various techniques have been used to produce homemade beer but there are disadvantages with many.
The ingredients for the fermentation process for beer-making are notoriously old and well known and include malt, sugar, hops, water, yeast nutrients etc. as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,929,452 and British Patent 2,123,850A. Based on prior art knowledge as found in British Patent 2,123,850A, a carbonated beverage can only be obtained by directly fermenting under pressure, under chilled conditions, which the domestic operator generally cannot reasonably do. Any desired carbonation is performed commonly as a separate step after bottling the fermented brew. In general, homemade beer is made in an "open" system. That is, homemade beer is generally made under ambient or atmospheric conditions where the beer is exposed to the atmosphere. Making beer under these conditions allows oxygen to be absorbed into the beer. This can adversely affect shelf-life expectancy and flavor degradation. In addition, cleanliness is very important in making homemade beer and with the variety of containers, hoses and the like which inherently must be used in the process, the cleanliness requirement is troublesome. Yet a further disadvantage is that beer produced by homemade techniques is inconsistent in quality between batches. Because of these disadvantages, the homemade beer industry is not growing as robustly as might otherwise be the case.